Endgame Reviews

The senior leadership team is essentially absent-- the CEO Nate Fick seems to have moved away to Maine (how has this been kept quiet?) and is distracted by lots of unrelated activities, and the rest of the leadership team seems to be often either WFH or on vacation. Not surprisingly, the company has suffered from repeated inability to execute on business functions, while the engineering team over delivers and works nights and weekends. It is extremely frustrating. Also-- there seems to be a trend of either overlooking, pushing aside, pushing out, or throwing under the bus the women in the company. We don't have much diversity to begin with - it's a tough culture. Whether intentional or not, it is starting to look like a trend, and not a good one. I for one, expect more from my leaders, especially given all that is going on out in the world. We have a chance to be different. And we are not. Finally- even when the company has a great technical achievements, the accolades go to the CEO who does not publicly acknowledge the people who actually delivered and takes all the credit.

A full year after change of C-Suite management, no clear idea of what product to sell. HR Department was fired with change in management and was replaced by a sole contractor to cover a near doubling of the workforce. Fired 5 of 13 employees in a meeting and offered the other 8 the option to take a 10% salary increase to move to Arlington, VA or to work for 2 more months and take severance (employees that desired to stay were responsible for negotiating for more than the offered amount if they deemed it too low). Product Managers had no clear direction of what potential customers would want or need. Sales teams were fired multiple times, each time without any tangible product to sell. The only product that had a customer received little to no resources, upgrades, or work, causing a loss of a major customer and the potential loss of the other major customer if huge features aren't implemented soon. Employees promoted to managers/team leads expected to spend many hours (10-15/week) in meetings, handle hiring for their team, and still perform at the previous levels. Product deadlines and feature ideas only defined by demos for conferences (such as RSA), not by customer feedback. No sort of agile (or any) planning system in place for determining time to develop or to prioritize features. PTO payout upon termination/quit removed the same day that the large firing occurred, so anyone deciding to quit who wasn't fired did not get paid out. This was disguised as a "take all the leave you want with management approval", but was mostly a way to take another pay benefit away from long-time employees. Frequent meetings involving 12 or more people about software design decisions, which devolve into arguments about naming conventions.